Blowhole of the Mind

Peak 2740, Glacial Lake Peak, with Nick. We descended via a fine butt glissade down the gully in the middle.

        In April of 2018, I received a grant from kigsblog to continue my research into Mental Process, enough to fund another trip to the Kigluait, the mountains north of Nome. Glacial Lake was our destination, a known energy node, the perfect place to gather electromagnetic data on PHI fluctuation, not only to expand upon the theories of Tononi, but also demonstrate that lithosphere itself is able to carry a non-negligible PHI resonance. Nick, of course, was keen to put on the PHI-SI headsets and blast out to to Glacial Lake on high-powered snow-machines for a day of fun. 

We followed the Teller Road from Nome, then cut across to Glacial Lake.

       The significant PHI event came not as expected at our destination, the Glacial Lake constriction, but on the way there, in the unnamed drainage west of Glacial Lake. We snow-machined into a sudden PHI-current that flowed from this valley. I immediately became disoriented, but kept my thumb on the throttle of my machine so as to keep my data register on a steady axis. Nick did the same, but we soon became separated, and I began to drive in widening circles across the firm snow in an effort to locate Nick within the psychic anomaly. Visibility was excellent on a fine day, but it seemed that Nick had disappeared into thin air. Calmly I backtracked by following our own snow-machine trails, but immediately fell prey to Heffalump Syndrome: I kept on discovering my own tracks, kept returning to the time and place I had started, no matter how hard I tried to escape. 
       I had lost Nick in the mountains to a Pocket Universe, a kind of temporary side universe that happened to be slicing through that valley during the time/space region we were. A Blowhole of the Mind, if you will.

Nick heading up Pk. 2740 towards the gneiss ribs.

          As landforms funnel and amplify the power of focussed wind, so do they to PHI. The PHI wind, however, is more mercurial than atmosphere. Where and when Mind is dispersed through Causality, Mind is just as likely to stop as start, which is one of the doggone things that makes my research into Mental Process so difficult, and renders it so far below the event horizon of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as to be total and complete bunkum.
          After twenty minutes, PHI levels subsided. Nick and I phased back into a co-universe, and I heard the reassuring sound of his snow-machine in my universe once again. We proceeded toward Glacial Lake, still two miles away, me with an agenda, Nick, to see what he could see, I presume. I cannot really know what another is thinking. Nor can I be sure it wasn't me, and not Nick, that had slipped into the parallel universe.

The naming game is an uncomfortable game, but I propose "Peak Bering Air" for this one, Pk. 2780, located west of Glacial Lake. Does not there need to be a Peak Bering Air in the Kigs? These are the bowls where Nick and I saw the fresh heli-skiers tracks. Ben, the awesome pilot, told me (as we flew past it) that he and and his brother Russell had climbed this mountain one summer.

         Our structure was founded upon intent to "bag" Pk. 2780, a rather lumpen mountain that runs along the west side of Glacial Lake. But when we arrived, we saw sinusoidal ski tracks in the bowls where we intended to slog up. Human sign, now there's something you don't see often in the middle of the Kigs! Bering Air and associates must have heli-skied the mountain the week before. (Check out this cool video) This discovery, the merest sign of human impact, significantly altered the calibrations on our headsets, rendering further data collection useless. Resonance of Mental Process through stone creates an extremely weak signal. Detection requires an empty set of mountains, psychic silence, a pure, unsullied wilderness. We had accounted for the noxious presence of ourselves and our machines, but now the settings were off. 
       Suddenly, the peak on the other side of the valley looked more attractive, so we motored across the frozen lake to climb that one instead. 

Another look at Pk. 2780 from the summit of Pk. 2740, April 14, 2018

       My memory console dropped down some history with the new peak, Peak 2740, indexed under the not-very-snazzy name of Glacial Lake Peak. The first time I tried to bag Glacial Lake Peak, solo, in 2005, I fell prey to a nap on a ledge in the warm April sun, only halfway up the mountain. Tired from teaching. But the file contained surprising affect bandwidth, no doubt from the encounter I had on the way up with a sexy porcupine. 
       Climbing with ice tools in hand, enjoying easy mixed ground, I turned a corner and found myself face to face with a wolverine! The log shows an adrenalin rush. Soon, however, the pixels resolved, and I realized it was a porcupine, lazing on a ledge in the Spring sun, as I was soon to do. She lay there, quills against the rock wall, and flashed me a Mona Lisa smile, a blatant come hither look. Quickly, I climbed on, only to be stopped higher up by the nap.
       The next failed climbing attempt on Glacial Lake Peak came the following year. Earp and I machined into the Kigs on a day so cold, so completely allapa, that we were too afraid to shut the machines off when we got there. Again, however, the Memory File is coded with strong affect, the reason being that as we crossed the Sinuk River on the way to Glacial Lake via the Stewart River, I took my most harrowing snow-machine wipeout ever. It was the early days of Super Smooth Andy G., an Arctic Cat .570 Bearcat, and I had not learned that if you give it gas on bare ice, the back end of the machine shoots out from under you in a rotary motion. Off the machine I went, sliding across the Sinuk River ice like a curling stone. Inertia kept me going for some time. I was spinning across the ice, looking up at the sky. Super Smooth Andy was somewhere nearby, also still traveling, unmanned. At one point we bumped against each other and I pushed the big Bearcat gently away. Earp saw the whole thing from the bank of the river, but it was too cold right then to dwell upon the horror of it, and I seemed to be unscathed.
          The presence of such strong memory markers associated with Glacial Lake Peak adventures leads me to believe the mountain may be manifesting a detectable Mental Resonance signal. Essentially, if you include the mountain within your trip structure, the defined piece of scarp establishes itself at the locus of a vortex of causation which manifests at various distributed points in your life, like a magnet generating patterns in a field of iron filings, increasing the chance things will happen somewhere, like wipeouts and porcupines.     

Looking northwest from base of Pk. 2740. Let this caption be a PEEMARK. There is a rather spectacular tor in this picture, center top, on top of the ridge, that eye soloed one summer. About sixty feet, 5.6. I call it Red Tip, because it has one. So, yeah, MARK! Lift leg, squirt, smells ever so faintly of toxic masculinity. 

            Though a failure in terms of science, the third attempt on Glacial Lake Peak proved a successful peak bag. Didn't take longer than an hour or two from the machines. I felt vaguely sheepish as Nick, wearing light boots and shorts, scrambled up the spine of the rock buttress while I, kitted out in double boots, crampons, axes, helmet, and big pack, kick-stepped up steep snow alongside the rock. He was the Californian now, and I had become the guy in Freedom Of the Hills that we used to ridicule, the Seattle guy who had overpacked for his weekend trip to the Cascades.
       One could construct a harder mixed climb somewhere on the orthogneiss ribs of Glacial Lake Peak. We romped up gullies and ribs, dipping into the rocks as needed. On the summit, our PHI-SI headsets crackled to life as we gazed out over the entire range. The butt glissade back down to the bottom goes down as a classic.

Suluun is only a dark smudge on the horizon, but you can see clearly see the Sulu Tor poking up there, slightly left of dead center. Osborn on horizon to right. Looking over the Pinarut peaks. Wilson (mostly) and I skied the gable in the foreground  last year. Mark!

          Now all we have to do is take the data back to the lab, and hope it provides more evidence that will supply the missing factor in my equations.  Of course I cannot post the equations here at this time. Any oversimplified explanation is doomed to degenerate into incoherent spew, but here goes anyway.
        As Einstein took the velocity of light to be a constant, so this theory takes the magnitude of consciousness to be a constant. Any system assumed to manifest consciousness is assumed to have a magnitude of 1.0 PHI. The basic unit of consciousness is your consciousness. Occam's Razor, right? The move is counterintuitive, as I'm sure you imagine the magnitude of your own tremendous consciousness to be greatly elevated over that of others, or a beetle, or a stone. Yet, when each consciousness-system is assumed to be equivalent, the mathematical description of consciousness (using a graphic analogy) elongates into a continuous strand which diminishes down to the diameter of the Planck length, and then reverses polarity past the blackhole/whitehole horizon. Potential for Mind, if not its kinetic expression (such as a synchronicity, precognition, social media network, or the thoughts in the neural network of a chimpanzee), is expressed at any infinitely-small point in the Universe. The denominator gets cranked down to the size of the event horizon of each white hole/black hole system.
       I'm still having a few problems resolving some anomalies in the data. Science must be observable, predictable, repeatable. Mind is elusive in these respects. However, continued research in the Kigluait will provide more data which may fill in the gaps. Please leave comments to provide your support, or to bring up anything I missed. 

Looking west down the spine of the Kigs from Glacial Lake Peak to the Singtook.